Friday, July 2, 2010

Pardon the dreadful pun in the title, it refers to the latest round of funding from Eurimages.

I have noted before that of the eight feature film projects supported by Eurimages over the last two and a half years that involve an Irish co-producer only one of them is directed (and written) by an Irish director.

We now have two further decisions from Eurimages concerning projects with Irish participation, involving substantial amounts of public money, and neither is being led by Irish talent. The total Eurimages contribution to these ten projects is about €4.2m, not including the €650,000 awarded to La Mula which Ireland boarded after the Eurimages decision.

This Must Be the Place is also written by Sorrentino and has an offer of €500,000 from the Irish Film Board. A Royal Affair is written by Arcel and R. Heisterberg and received a provisional offer of commitment for an unspecified amount from the IFB in the same funding round as the Sorrentino project, 23 April 2010 (the third of only three rounds published so far in 2010).

Presumably IFB funding is being made available to both projects because either some (or all) of each film is being shot in Ireland, some crew are being hired here, or because the post-production is taking place here. Doubtless the projects will also apply for Section 481 funding.

That said, A Royal Affair has public funding from Riga City Council on the basis that the film will be shot in the Latvian capital. The Sorrentino project will shoot in Dublin and Wicklow for three weeks in August before relocating to the US for seven weeks. The film follows Sean Penn's character, an aged rocker, who hopes to reconcile with his dying father but has left it too late.

If one were to add up the amount of public funding going into the ten 'Irish' Eurimages projects - Eurimages + IFB + Section 481 - you would be forgiven for thinking that the 'service' side of film production was aggregating far more of this public money than Irish directing and writing talent and indigenously developed projects.